St. Helena, Napa County, California
September 1999
I SHARED SOMETHING IN COMMON with my husband: I was good at pretending like things had never happened. I tried not to think about Emilia Rosser and how I had felt seeing her again. I had no idea if she’d contact me, but I carried around her business card in my wallet, every now and then pulling it out to study her embossed name, the phone number she’d jotted above the work one. I considered what would happen if I called the number. Had she put it there because she wanted me to? Was she here for another reason besides wine?
I pushed away the thought. I let myself be distracted by Camille, by her booming laugh and dry humor. She often followed me into the vines as I took measurements leading up to the pick, toting Kieran around and burying kisses into his chubby neck. She knew I didn’t want to be alone. It had happened before: the first time I’d given birth, after David and I came home from the hospital. I had no idea what I was doing, and I sensed I was about to screw it all up. Camille had been living in New York at the time, and she flew to Napa and slept in our guest bedroom, cooked meals, and even washed my hair as I recovered from my C-section, my incision itchy and inflamed. She sat in silence with me as I cried, free-flowing postpartum tears I didn’t even fully understand, tears that frustrated David, who seemed to always be working on the vineyard, unhelpful for anything he couldn’t immediately fix.
When Kieran was born, Camille was living in Santa Barbara, and having her closer was an immense source of comfort. She’d been there at the hospital, rubbing my shoulders and applying pressure to my back while I was in labor. At home, she’d dropped in with coffee and meals, offering to hold my colicky baby so I could get some sleep. David and I had been to Santa Barbara to visit with her and Paul numerous times before their divorce, and those were some of the happiest times in our marriage. The way he tended to me in public; the way his hand always seemed to find the small of my back, his fingers humming with electricity.
But things were different after Paul told Camille he didn’t think he wanted kids anymore. Before they were married, they’d had discussions about family, especially because they met in their late thirties and didn’t have the luxury of time. Paul had been open to it, even though he’d spent much of his life indifferent. He said Camille had changed his mind—that he’d wanted a family with her. But then when the time actually came, he balked.
I knew Camille felt betrayed by his admission that he wanted a child-free life after all. I assumed that after her divorce from Paul, Camille would return to her nomadic lifestyle—she had no roots in Santa Barbara—but she seemed stuck. He’d given her the apartment in their divorce settlement, and it had become her albatross.
Don’t worry about me, she often said, a joking tone in her voice during our calls. I’m always going to be fine.
I’d admired how she had handled everything, but I saw the joy in her eyes when she played with Kieran, engaging him in a way I never seemed to have the energy for. She would have been a better wife, a better mother, than I ever was to David and the boys. Camille got down on the floor with them, the same way David did after a day of working on the winery. They both made it look so easy, to sink to their level, to lose themselves in the tumble of the kids.
I could handle the baby phase, its mundanely predictable rotation. Eat, change, rock, sleep. It was the stage that followed that I struggled with most. Preschool. Childhood. Play. Watch me. Watch this. Watch me, Mommy. I rarely crouched down to become part of their world. I realized, too late, that I was subconsciously waiting for them to grow into mine.
“There was a woman here looking for you,” Camille said when I came into the house after being in the vineyard, helping the pickers with their haul. “She was kind of wandering around. Really pretty—blonde hair. Emilia, she said her name was?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, offering one of my grape-reddened hands to Kieran, who turned away from me and into Camille’s arms.
“Who is she?” Camille asked. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“She’s a wine buyer. I wonder if she came back here to put in an order. I know she liked what she tried.” I paused. “And she sounds familiar because I knew her in college.”
“Wait,” Camille said, pushing her hair—the same light brown shade as mine, but cut in a tousled bob, whereas mine hung listlessly past my shoulders—behind her ear. “You don’t mean—the Emilia who you—”
I nodded. “Yes. That Emilia.”
“She just randomly showed up here, after all this time?”
“She and David have been in touch about wine. He was supposed to meet with her the other day but obviously wasn’t here to do it.”
“And David doesn’t know about you and her?”
I shook my head. “No. I never told him. I didn’t feel the need to.” I thought back to my conversation with Emilia in the tasting room. I’d felt invigorated, like I had been taking a holiday and was being the best version of myself with the change of scenery.
I stood up, reached into my purse, and grabbed my wallet, Emilia’s business card inside. I wanted to call her. If Emilia placed an order for one of her clients, it would be something to tell David about when he returned, proof that things could run just fine in his absence.
“I’m going to call Emilia,” I said. I brought the business card into the kitchen and dialed her number from the landline before I could talk myself out of it.
For some reason, the throaty cadence of her hello when she picked up made me forget what I was about to say.
“Emilia? Hi. You left me your business card, and my sister said you were here looking for me today. Is there something I can help you with?” I cringed at the overly formal tone of my voice, and a pause stretched interminably on the other end.
“Who is this?” she finally said. My cheeks heated up, and I tried to stammer out my own name, but then her soft laugh filled the air. “I’m kidding, obviously. Of course I know who it is. Hi, Bev Jamieson.”
“Do you want to try out any more of our wines? Because I’d be happy to set up a tasting—”
“I was actually thinking you could taste some other wines with me,” she said. “I came back looking for you, but I met your sister instead.”
“She’s staying with me for a bit, to help with the kids while David is… away.”
“That’s nice of her. Anyway, I’m in Stags Leap, staying at the Blossom. I was just about to get some dinner.”
I paused. “So you want to—eat dinner with me?”
“Yes,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“Why?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
“Because I’m hungry?” she said with a laugh. “And we have a lot to catch up on, don’t we? I mean, if you’re game for cheating on your own wines with a different winery.”
I swallowed, silence lingering between us.
“I’m hungry too. I’ll see you soon.” I hung up and went to ask Camille if she could watch Kieran, a question I already knew the answer to.
The Blossom—the nickname for Blossom Estates Winery—was palatial, with thick walls hewn out of gray stone and turrets designed to give it the look of a medieval castle. I instantly felt out of place when I showed up in their tasting room. I was wearing a wrap dress, with my hair in a high ponytail, but my clothes didn’t fit me the same since having Kieran, loose in some places and tight in others. I’d nursed Kieran before leaving him with Camille, and my breasts felt shrunken and deflated. I saw Emilia first from the back. Her blonde curls were fanned out across her shoulders; a black leather skirt hugged her hips. She turned around when I entered the room, and closed the space between us, grabbing my hands.
“Look at these,” she said, rolling my wrists so that my palms faced up, my fingertips inky from touching the grapes, from bringing them to my mouth to check for ripeness. “I noticed them the other day. I pictured you using them. All the magic you’ve made with your wine hands.” She cocked her head. She ran her index fingers along mine as if they were seams, and I fixated on her manicured nails. “My hands—they’re for presenting bottles with a flourish. Pulling corks. Pouring perfectly.” She paused. “Enough about hands. I don’t know why I’m even talking about this. Am I nervous? Please, tell me to shut up.”
“Don’t,” I said with a weak laugh. “I’ve always hated my hands. How they never look clean. I have all these calluses, and I’m sure I’ll get arthritis from all the vine-pruning work.”
Two garnet-colored glasses appeared on the bar in front of us. I followed Emilia to a pillared patio and sank onto a stone bench across from her. At least two hundred acres of vineyard stretched until it disappeared into the spiny haunches of the mountains.
“We all have flaws,” she said as her blouse slipped down her shoulder. “My scar from falling out of a tree when I was eight. Remember? I tried to tell you I’d been in a bar fight.”
“Ha. And I told you mine was from a bike crash, and you assumed I meant a motorcycle, not a Disney-princess bike.” I tipped up my throat, knowing that the tiny milk-white scar was almost imperceptible unless someone was really looking.
“My badass biker chick. Your throat has so much character.”
I laughed. “But really, it bled a lot. The whole thing was very dramatic. Camille was screaming, and I was just gushing blood from my throat, thinking I was going to die.”
“Well, thankfully, we both survived, and now we’re here together. I want to know everything about living on a winery. Waking up with the grapes right there. Tell me about it.” She leaned forward, her brown eyes fixed on me.
I told her first about the climate, which was almost perpetually warm and bright, besides the occasional fog that the sun burned off as it crested the foothills. I talked about Napa, its Michelin-starred restaurants and abundance of festivals, especially around harvest time, always something to do and see. I explained how my favorite work was my interactions with the environment itself, the hands-on parts. The testing of grapes, collecting fruit samples, checking pH and sugar levels. The hush over the vines when it felt like I was the only person in the world. Emilia seemed to hang on to my every word.
“I always knew you’d end up with an interesting life,” she said. “The way you used to talk about art—remember all those conversations we had? I’d teach you about wine, and you’d teach me about art. We’d be up till, like, three in the morning. Now you’ve taken over my role.”
I laughed, but my cheeks started to flush.
“Now, this place—it’s really legendary. A lot of people say it put Napa on the map. Its cabernet defeated the top Bordeaux at the Judgment of Paris, 1976. Although maybe you know that already,” I said.
“I did know that,” she said. “A real David-versus-Goliath situation.” Her smile wavered. “David. So he’s still on his business trip?”
I swirled the wine around in my glass to release the aromas, then brought it to my nose and inhaled deeply to avoid answering her. When she showed up a few days ago, she’d said she kept in touch with David over the years. Why hadn’t she kept in touch with me?
“Black currant,” I said. “Black cherry. And I can smell plum.”
Emilia mimicked my sequence, but it was imbued with her own grace, her movements precise but artful, almost like I was watching a dancer complete a familiar routine. I used to love watching David sniff wine, but over the last few months, I’d been fixating on the clinical way his nostrils flared when he inhaled. Watching Emilia was practically hypnotic, how she gave her whole face to the act, closing her eyes and pressing her lips together. I was suddenly nineteen again, in a dorm room, trying to make sense of my feelings.
“Ripe plum. Not baked. And there’s a hint of licorice in there too. Something else. Blueberry.” She brought the glass to her lips. “Sometimes I think it’s ironic how you wouldn’t have met David if not for me.”
I wasn’t expecting her to take us back into the past. But she wasn’t wrong. Emilia and I had lived in the same dorm freshman and sophomore year, and she and David had been in the same viticulture and enology program. The fall of junior year, before she left for study abroad in Provence, she’d invited me to a party one of her classmates was hosting, and it was there that I met David.
By then, I knew my feelings for Emilia were more than friendly, but I’d never acted on them until the night before she left. I was afraid to. My sexuality confused me. I’d had boyfriends before, and had never thought of girls as more than friends, but Emilia was different. I had pictured how her lips would feel against mine. I’d imagined us going further. I’d wondered if she imagined it too, or if that version of us only existed in my head.
“Me too,” I said.
My attraction to David had been instant: he was handsome and flirtatious, with his shaggy hair and twinkling eyes, the kind of person who vibrated energy and charisma. I hadn’t expected him to notice me, but he came over immediately and introduced himself. He spoke with his hands, always gesticulating. He liked to touch. It seemed like part of him was always grazing part of me, and the way he clung to my every word made me feel singularly important. When he left to get us drinks, I watched him, not wanting him to touch anyone else, to give his undivided attention away.
I think he likes you, Emilia had said, bumping my hip with hers. The smile that had played on her lips looked weird, like she wasn’t happy at all.
“I mean, maybe you would have met anyway,” Emilia said now. “The universe has a way of pushing people together when it’s meant to be.”
I drained the rest of my glass, the wine going straight to my head.
“Why are you really here?” I asked Emilia, raising my eyes to meet hers. “Why now?”
“Because I had an appointment with David,” she said. “That’s the truth.”
“That’s all?” I said, my voice practically a whisper.
Her silence answered for her. And maybe it was the wine, or my rage toward David, or my anger at myself for driving him away. But on the breezy patio, where Emilia and I were the only two people on a Thursday evening, I closed the distance between us and pressed my lips against hers, petal light, as if my mouth were an open O against a mirror. It felt like a homecoming, a wormhole to the past, another life I could have lived.
She responded, slow but urgent, her lips circling mine, and the place I felt it most was in my chest, like my heart was splitting into pieces, splinters of it exploding like shrapnel from my rib cage. I squeezed my eyes shut. Her hands migrated to my hair, her fingers light spokes against my scalp. I pulled away, forcing myself to end something that I wanted to last much longer. I was afraid to look at her, but when I opened my eyes I saw that she was still fixated on me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, even though I didn’t mean it.
“You said that last time,” she said. “You weren’t sorry then either.”
“I don’t—I mean, I’m married,” I said, looking around to see if anyone had noticed us. What was I thinking? People knew me and David. They knew the Golden Grape. Napa was a lot of land, but it was small in many ways. How many people already knew about David’s indiscretion? He would be humiliated if people thought our happy family was broken, but it would kill him if we actually were.
“You don’t kiss other women, or cheat on your husband?”
I soured on her use of the word cheat. It shouldn’t be cheating when David did it first.
“Both.”
Emilia whispered in my ear, sending a shiver down the knobs of my spine. “I won’t judge. And you know I won’t tell.”
The two of us in her dorm room as I helped her pack for Provence: all the words unsaid. I wanted to tell her to stay. I wanted her to ask me to go with her. The tears that had leaked out of my eyes in the dark. Her fingertips on my cheeks.
I pushed away thoughts of the past. Regret wouldn’t change a thing.
“I want to see you again before you leave.” I reached for her perfectly manicured hand and watched it twine between my fingers, my ruddy wine hands. “I just—I’ve thought about you so often over the years. I wondered if you thought about me.”
She paused. “I did. Of course I did. But I thought if I reached out, you might not want to talk to me… I couldn’t take the chance.”
I didn’t respond because I didn’t want to lie to her. Would I have risked unburying all the old feelings, had David not cheated first?
“I’m not a cheater. David slept with someone else,” I said, the shock from hearing the words out loud reverberating through my body. “He confessed recently, and I kicked him out. He said it was only once, but now everything is such a mess.”
Emilia’s mouth twisted into a grimace. “So this is about getting back at him?”
“No. No, that’s not it at all. That has nothing to do with you.” I couldn’t articulate the complex emotions David’s betrayal had wrought.
She smiled sadly. “I can’t be your revenge, Bev. Just like back then, I couldn’t be… whatever you needed me to be. I thought you and David were happy.”
My face was flaming. “Did you?”
Again, she was silent.
I stood up. “I’m sorry. I need to get back. You know—the harvest and all. But I hope you enjoy the rest of your time here.” I turned around and maneuvered through the other tables, not wanting to look back.
“Bev—” she called. “I’m just trying to be honest—”
My vision was tear blurred as I ran away, as I got into my car and drove back to the vineyard and the beautiful life David and I had built and destroyed together.